REBUILDING THE FUTURE

The Covid-19 outbreak has delivered a shattering blow but, said new SLL president Bob Bohannon, it is an opportunity to reevaluate – and build back better

The president’s role in this year of all years, said Bob Bohannon, was to enable 'the amazing talent within the society to deliver on the objectives and challenges facing us all'.

Coronavirus, he continued, 'has given many of us a chance to reevaluate what is important. Clear skies or cheap air travel? Quiet streets, clean air and the sound of birdsong, or the freedom to drive?' It was an opportunity to address issues such as climate change from an industry perspective. 'The Covid-19 lockdown has, temporarily, cut CO2 emissions, but it has also triggered a huge economic contraction,' said Bohannon. 'Some governments are calling to harness their economic recovery to plans to boost low carbon design and technology. They call this Build Back Better.'

Citing how NASA's ICE Sat 2 was using light in the form of LiDAR to measure climate change, specifically the ice loss from the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, Bohannon said the evidence was 'terrifying', showing that the Thwaites and Crosson ice shelves have lost 5m and 3m of ice each year for the past 16 years. 'In total Greenland and Antarctica have lost more than 300 gigatons of ice a year. Just one gigaton will fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.' 'We might have the data,' he said, 'but to put it simply we are losing the war against climate change.'

He quoted Seth Scott, CEO of climate change consultant ProBorea, who wrote in a Greenbiz article, that 'Sustainability currently consists of 99 per cent cost savings and one per cent environmental savings… a 5 focus on energy efficiency has distracted our E

industry from the original goal – an impact on the environment.'

Over the past five to 10 years much of the lighting industry has embraced 'a laser focus on luminaire efficiency and the return on investment of replacing legacy light sources with LED,' said Bohannon. 'Lower prices improve ROI, and this, and the design and build procurement method, drove down prices.'

The benefit, he said, was that the lighting sector of building services has delivered huge reductions in emitted CO2. But there have been costs, he added. 'Importing a lowest-possible-cost, 30,000 hour, 600 x 600 LED panel without any serviceable components, on a container ship from the other side of the world, which burns high sulphur content bunker fuel spewing sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulates, is maybe not the most environmentally sound way of delivering light. Even if it does score well in SBEM. 'As the late US ecologist Prof Barry Commoner, wrote, "The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else".'

Much of the current industry design and build structure is predicated on short-term saving of capital cost to deliver buildings that perform for about as long as the warranty or retention period lasts, said Bohannon. 'We all have our own horror stories on value engineering, or simply the selling of products so cheap that they are effectively a light fitting in name only. I was told the story of builders finding the product quality of cheap wholesaler LED downlights so poor that they were losing money on having to return to new installations to replace failed luminaires. Their problems were compounded by the difficulty 'The of getting

one clear, irrefutable message that keeps coming through is the benefits of daylight'

replacements from the same batch. Their solution: use GU10 downlights, where they can easily replace the GU10 LED sources. Progress? I think not.'

Most important of all, continued Bohannon, was the end user’s lighting aspirations. 'How does light better enable their organisation, be it a school, office, hospital or shop to meet their objectives? If they don’t know this, or if we haven’t explained it to them, then why should we be surprised that they simply buy the cheapest.'

With so many people working from home, we have come to question the daily commute, the need for offices and for driving or flying to meetings, said Bohannon. 'How many of us, working in home studies, on kitchen tables, in bedrooms or garden sheds will now see the obsession with delivering 500 lux, wall-to-wall, so that even the waste bin in the corner is bathed in light, as simply ridiculous. No matter how efficient the luminaire, such a scheme is surely now ludicrous,' he said.

Bohannon moved on to the related issue of daylighting. A lot of the society’s time had been spent on 'circadian lighting', he said, yet the one clear, irrefutable message that keeps coming through is the benefits of daylight. He cited Eleanora Brembilla, research associate in Advanced Building Daylight Modelling at Loughborough University and one of this year's LightBytes speakers, who had made a plea that access to daylight needs to rapidly move up the planner's agenda. Interestingly, the London Plan addresses daylight, he said. 'To me it seems ironic that there have been lengthy discussions about human-centric artificial lighting and much less about natural daylight.'

Overall the SLL needed to promote the value of light, said Bohannon. 'The more the wider public realises what light does, the more our clients are likely to engage with us and move away from the lowest common denominator, price-driven discussion.'

Safety, integrity, resilience were all watchwords. 'We need high-quality teaching within our profession and our society to promote competence,' he added.

CIBSE and the SLL are now home to 'a remarkable, multicultural pool of young lighting talent from countries across the world', as far afield as India, Mexico, the Middle East, Hong Kong and Australasia, he said. 'Many of these young designers and engineers may now be facing harsh financial times again. We need to be relevant to them, to help them, to keep up their energy and their motivation.'

It was not a task that he could achieve alone nor could it be done in just a single year, said Bohannon. 'I’m simply not smart enough, creative enough to do it. I don’t have enough time in a year. But you can. The Society of Light and Lighting is one of the world's largest learned lighting societies. We have brilliant academics, daylighters, product designers, lighters, managers, engineers, sales people, students and teachers in our ranks. If I can do one small thing this year, it is to help you, the society, Build Back Better.'

Background

Bob Bohannon has 30 years' experience in lighting, designing and delivering lighting schemes including major projects such as London's Royal Albert Hall and St Pancras Station. Now director of lighting consultant LuxRapide, he began in the early 1980s with a BSc Hons in business studies from Bradford University School of Management. He subsequently moved into lighting, gaining an LIF Advanced Certificate in the late 1980s and an MSc in Light and Lighting at UCL in 1993. He became a lighting designer with BDP, moving on to become general manager of Sill Lighting UK for nearly 18 years. Prior to his current company, he helped establish lighting consultant Lux Populi in this country as UK director. A strong believer in both environmental and corporate social responsibility, he is committed to reduce the environmental impact of his activities for the sake of generations to follow.

This year's presidential address was given online on 21 May. It was preceded by a message from outgoing SLL president Jim Shove before he handed over the role to Bob Bohannon. The event was chaired by SLL vice president and president elect Ruth Kelly Waskett. The address can be seen in full at www.sll.org.uk